How AI is Changing the Service Desk for Staff and End-Users

Chatbot technology and other artificial intelligence tools represent a watershed moment in customer service innovation. Now businesses can provide their customers with intuitive, human-like support features that improve self-service experiences and raise satisfaction.

In the realm of the service desk, AI has the potential to revolutionize not only how users receive support from IT service management professionals, but also how users can more adequately support themselves.

Let's take a look at the challenges a traditional IT service organization faces today and how chatbots, AI and machine learning make improve ITSM operations for everyone - technicians and end users alike.

Traditional self-service models can't do the job alone When users have the agency and knowledge base in which to resolve their own support issues without involving a technician, everybody wins. ITSM professionals reserve their valuable time for high-tier problems and end users restore continuity with speed, not to mention a sense of personal accomplishment.

That, however, happens only in an ideal world, one where self-service tools exceed end-user expectations. The truth is, unfortunately, that this isn't always the case. According to a 2015 Forrester survey, more than half of online shoppers seeking self-service would abandon their purchases altogether if they couldn't find the information they needed. But what does that say about service desk outside e-commerce? The answer is one of two things: Users unsatisfied with unclear or ineffective self-service will either divert their questions to support technicians or give up on resolving their issue completely (if they have that luxury).

So how can your business better enhance self-service to meet the demands of your customers? It might be wise to consider investing in intelligent service desk solutions that feature chatbots with natural language capabilities built in as a part of their self-service functionality. Instead of clicking around a website or reading through an entire FAQ page, chatbots use advanced natural language processing to allow users to ask simple questions to arrive at straightforward answers, thus maintaining high satisfaction amongst your customers. And when satisfaction is high, you won't have to worry about costly, low-tier issues slowing down their operations.

AI pushes incident ticket processing into overdriveWhat industry isn't looking for smarter, easier and more efficient ways of working? The ITSM industry is no exception. So what's keeping ITSM professionals up at night?

Long resolution times: The rise of cloud, big data, and mobile technology has only sped up response time expectations for end users. Will the solution be able to deliver as the workload grows steadily more complex?

A lack of knowledge: Innovation is a double-edged sword. What you knew yesterday is no longer relevant today. Do technicians have all the tools and access to information they need to stay on top of their shifting industry?

Clerical mistakes: Human errors like an unintended keystroke or a missed field can easily result in service delays. What safeguards are put in place on the service desk to prevent the seemingly inevitable?

An intelligent service management solution is the key to solving these pressing issues. By using predictive analytics, machine learning and other smart technologies that leverage historical ticket data, today's IT staff is better equipped to plan, work through and resolve incidents at faster and more successful rates. On the flip side, end users also benefit by getting the support they need immediately without the time and resource constraints to come with traditional of person-to-person interactions. Additionally, the AI gets smarter incrementally to help organizations maximize speed and efficiency. In other words, the more users interact with the real-time systems, the smarter and more effective it will be in the future.

Together, these new technologies help to expedite service delivery, reduce training time for new or experienced ITSM professionals, keep the TCO down for service desk operations and make customers happy.